


Bad Trip

by dilangley



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: After The Farm, Canon Divergence, Drug Use, F/F, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unfinished business all the way around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:46:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25392586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: On the trip to Santa Barbara, Ellie discovers a plant that makes her hallucinate. Turns out hallucinations are good for fighting the loneliness.Or Ellie gets more company on the road to revenge than she ever intended.
Relationships: Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us), Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 55





	Bad Trip

**Author's Note:**

> No beta. Forgive me.

_The mistake is not fatal. Ellie makes it in a dark, buggy forest somewhere over the Utah line after a week of travel. Her stomach hurts like she ate something rotten, so she pulls up the greens she knows can help. She eats them._

_They’re from the wrong plant._

“If you don’t throw it up, your stomach is going to keep hurting.” 

Ellie is alone in the forest, intestines clenching, mouth watering, throat full of bile, when she hears him. She whirls to the sound and scrambles upright on her bedroll.

Joel. It’s Joel. He’s right there, squatting down to stare at her. His voice still sounds like whiskey and honey, and his eyes still crinkle at the corners. They can still smile without his mouth moving at all.

It’s worse than another nightmare. Somehow she has fallen asleep and found herself in a dream where he is still alive.

“Wake up, Ellie. Wake the fuck up,” she commands. She scrubs her hands over her face, her clenched fists digging her nails into her palms. 

“Ellie.” It’s Joel’s voice again, reprimanding, a little impatient. 

“Stop it.” She bites her lower lip until she tastes blood and pushes against her eye sockets until she sees nothing. “Wake _up_.”

She shouts the last word. It rings in the air around her. A few impatient animals, flustered and startled, flush out of their nighttime roosts. She feels awake, but when she pulls her hands away from her face and opens her eyes, Joel has not moved.

“You done?” He asks. 

Ellie gapes at him. Her skin still stings from her nails, her mouth still tastes faintly of blood, so she knows she is awake. She knows she can’t have died in her sleep because there is no way she gets to go to Heaven and there is even less chance that when she gets to Hell, she’ll get to fight its demons alongside Joel.

“You’re dead,” she tells him as if he might have missed it. But she can’t say it without her chest suddenly hurting worse than her stomach. She can’t say it without being fourteen again in a freezing basement, low on ammunition and entirely out of prayers. Sometimes her whole life feels like one of the nightmares that gripped her that winter. Sometimes she wishes it was. Sometimes she thinks she would trade it all, every single second of it, to wake up back there where losing him had felt like the worst thing she could ever endure.

Back before she had known that, maybe, just maybe she had been right about that.

“I know,” he says, gentle, a little careful.

“Oh.” 

She realizes she’s crying, and she swipes the tears off her cheeks. The anger roars to life. “Then why are you fucking here?” 

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” 

“Someone has to look out for you.”

Ellie wants to tell him there’s no one left to look out for her. She wants to tell him about Jesse, shot through the head and left behind in a theatre in Seattle because she had no way to get him home. She wants to tell him about Tommy, blind, half from his fucked up eye and half from his rage. And Dina, heartbroken in a kitchen begging Ellie to be a bigger person than she knows how to be, begging Ellie to be more like her. 

And yet more than anything, she doesn’t want to tell him any of that because she doesn’t want him to know. 

“What are you doing out here, kiddo?” He asks her.

“I’m going after her,” she says. 

Joel stands up and shakes his head. “You’re going to throw up whatever rotten thing you ate, get a little sleep, and get back to that farm and that girl who loves you.”

“I can’t.” 

He’s wearing his jacket. Her eyes widen, and she touches her own arm. The rough familiar scratch of his coat is under her fingers even as she sees it on him. Her throat tightens.

 _You’re not real_. And fuck, that hurts too. She can’t bring herself to say that out loud. What if that makes him vanish? She stares at his face, whole and bright and alive. She closes her eyes, and she only sees him bloodied and empty. She’s drawn his face a hundred times in her journal, but she can never make it right, can never remember what his eyes looked like before that bitch beat him to death. 

“I’m not going to argue with you.” He’s not real, but he sounds tired. “You do need to throw up and get some sleep though.”

The question isn’t a joke, but she snorts around it. “Think it’ll make me feel better?” 

“There’s no point in putting it off.”

She nods, and she stands up to walk to the edge of the clearing. Bent over, she jams her finger into the back of her throat and gags around it. Her grateful stomach tosses out everything she ate today, heaves again, and tosses out everything she ate yesterday too. 

“There you go,” Joel says. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand as she straightens back up. He is pointing to her backpack, and she grabs the water bottle from inside to sip at it. She puts it beside her bedding and sits down.

“You’re going to stay?” Her voice sounds so different, even to her own ears, so small, so uncertain. It betrays her even more than the wobble at the corner of her mouth.

“You get some sleep. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He sits down beside her.

“Okay.” She lays down, but she doesn’t close her eyes. She watches him sitting there, staring up at the stars through the gaps in the treetops. He stretches his legs and slaps a mosquito on his neck. Her heart thumps against her rib cage as she watches him, his chest rising and falling, his breath almost visible in the growing chill. 

Eventually, her eyes grow heavy. As she closes them, she whispers, “Hey Joel.”

“What?”

“Why didn’t people like the restaurant on the moon?”

He chuckles. “I don’t know. Why?”

“It had no atmosphere.”

He groans, and she lets herself fall asleep while he mutters something about her needing new material. 

She sleeps all night.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Joel is gone in the morning, and the forest tries to make up for it with a symphony of bird songs. Ellie stares at the spot on the ground where he was last night and thinks maybe it really was a dream. She checks her forehead with the back of her hand as if she will be able to feel a fever. 

Nothing.

She breaks camp, rolls everything up, and puts out the fire. The map is old and worn through by now; it’s no help to her, when her only bearings are that she needs to go southwest, but she checks it anyway, marks with a pen how far she thinks she’s gone. There’s a town coming up. She can swing wide to avoid it. That’s the best choice if it’s already been picked clean or worse, if it will require her to expend resources just to survive it. 

But this is rural. It may not have infected or survivors, and it may be well-stocked with canned goods and ammunition. She decides to cut through.

Eventually, she finds herself strolling past agricultural fences and thinking about the farm she left behind.

_“I love you.”_

_“Then prove it.”_

Prove it. Fuck, didn’t she prove it every day she put one foot in front of the other? Didn’t she prove it by keeping her head above water, even though she’d never been a very strong swimmer? 

But loving Dina isn’t the only thing she has to prove. It has to get in line.

Some sick shadowy part of her wants there to be things to shoot in this town. In every stranger’s face, she always sees a flash of David, the potential for evil lurking under every person’s skin. When she was little, she believed in good and evil. She’s smarter than that now. She knows every person contains evil in multitudes.

That’s why she could trust Joel, even knowing what he did before knowing her, even knowing what he did for her in a hopeful hospital. She knew his good and his evil. She thinks he knew hers, even if she doesn’t always.

It’s why she is lost without him. Dina is beautiful, radiant, incredible. Ellie sees her light and loves it more than she can put into words, no matter how many pitiful songs she pens in secret pages, but she does not know Dina’s darkness.

And she knows all too well that everyone, everyone, _everyone_ has it. 

  
  


The town is empty of most everything, but she gets two rolls of duct tape and a box of bullets. She grabs a paperback off an old shelf and tucks it in her bag. She recognizes the name _Frankenstein_ but she’s never read the book. She doubts she’ll start now, but maybe having voices on a page will snuff out the quiet.

She makes good progress for the rest of the day. The ground is flat, the mud of the last few days finally dried up, so she pushes on until it’s too dark to be worth it. Her stomach feels better, even after she pops handfuls of old raisins like pills. 

At camp, she fishes in her backpack for the pigweed she picked for her stomach, figures one more dose before bed can’t hurt. But when she lays hands on it, she notices an unusual smell. She brings it up to her nose, sniffs, and then examines it more closely. Between the fire, the flashlight, and the bright round moon, tonight, she can see clearly it isn’t pigweed. The smooth, toothed leaves are similar but unfamiliar. 

“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself,” Ellie mutters as she looks at the tied bundle. She unties the string around it and tosses it away.

She journals for a little while, sketches J.J. in fat, baby glory, writes Abby’s name in the top right corner of the page so she doesn’t lose focus. 

It comes to her not in bits and snatches but all at once.

“Holy shit.” 

When did she last have a good dream she couldn’t wake up from? Shit, when did she last sleep through the whole night without bloodied, mutilated faces hitting the ground before her eyes? 

Just because it wasn’t real doesn’t mean it was a dream.

She scrambles to find each shriveled, wrinkled leaf with trembling fingers. Sitting there beside the fire, she stares at them flat in her palm. It’s a stupid idea, it might very well kill her, it might not work.

The leaves taste terrible, just as they did last night. 

She puts the journal away, zips up her backpack, and just sits cross-legged by the fire. 

“You’re going the wrong way.”

Ellie doesn’t open her eyes at the first sound of his voice this time. She just bites back a smile, a wince, a few angry tears.

“I checked the map,” she says.

“It’s the right way to Santa Barbara, but that’s not where you need to be going. I told you. You need to go home.”

“Let’s not argue.” She suggests, and he sighs. 

“Ellie…”

“Let’s not argue.” It’s a request this time. She opens her eyes, and he is sitting on the other side of the fire. He has his backpack on the ground beside him, ready to be a makeshift pillow like she has seen so many nights before, but he also has his guitar case laid out on the other side. Her throat fills up. A few coughs do nothing to clear it.

“You ought to play me something,” she says.

Joel keeps his hands busy all the time in Jackson. 

Kept. Joel kept his hands busy all the time in Jackson. If Ellie hadn’t always been so damn mad at him, so damn certain he had done something unspeakably stupid, she could have learned more. He knew how to make anything out of wood. Practical things, sure, like the shelves in her little house that just appeared one day to hold her music collection, but also beautiful things, figures and guitars and artwork. 

He didn’t play guitar for her though, not usually. If they were together, he always insisted on her playing, making her learn by doing. He said nobody got better if they were scared to sound bad. At the time, she had ribbed him for the implication that listening to him play would make her self-conscious, the implication that he was just that good.

If she asked him to play her something, he would redirect, hand her the guitar.

But she knows he can’t do that this time. The guitar, like him, isn’t really here. She wonders what will be stronger -- her memory of what Joel would really say or her brain’s desire not to break this illusion.

Joel surprises her. “Get out your journal.” 

She does.

“Got anything you’re working on?”

Ellie flips back to the pages where her unfinished song lives. She has dragged these lyrics and chords across the months, scratching out words here and there, changing up the notes. Instinctively, she almost hands him the journal but draws her hand back at the last instant.

“It’s not much yet.”

“I’ll give it a try.” Joel shrugs. 

They tool it around until he plays a version of the melody they both like, but when she shares the words, his eyes are so sad she feels like she let him down. He grumbles out the first verse, the only one she shares, but then he switches to something lighter. He plays his way through half of his favorites without singing a word, shooting her little looks over the guitar. 

The music floats under his voice when he finally speaks.

“Why are you out here?” He asked her that question last night too.

“I promised Tommy,” she says. Of all the honest reasons, this one ranks as the least important. His arrival, his grizzled delivery of the lead, had only chosen the moment. The sleepless nights and haunted days had assured her The Farm was no more than a fantasy until she finished this.

“Tommy,” Joel snorts. “I don’t care what he said, he doesn’t want you doing this.”

“She fucked him up,” Ellie says. Joel nods, considers this idea.

“How bad?” 

She turns back to a page in her journal where she drew it. The lines of Tommy’s face are broken by the scars around his eye. Underneath she had just scrawled out the words, _Doc says the limp is permanent._

“Can he still ride?” Joel’s voice snags a little, careful not to reveal too much.

“Yeah. It’s the only way he really gets around now.”

“Good. Then if he wants revenge, he can go get it himself.”

She changes the subject, but he never stops looking at her like that, like he sees right through her excuses and knows this isn’t about Tommy. He is just waiting on her to say it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The next morning, she wakes up hurting. Her skin itches, her mouth is dry, and her brain is a little fuzzy. As she slogs through yet another rainy trek, she talks aloud to herself. The content is wise, though she knows she won’t listen. She reminds herself Joel isn’t really there, considers the potentially dangerous possibilities that accompany eating plants she knows nothing about just to hallucinate. Killing Abby will require her to have absolute clarity: she wants to look her in the eye.

Ellie wants to hear Abby beg her to stop, and then, only then, does Ellie want to hear her choke on her last breath.

All the wise advice she gives herself keeps her on track for two days, but at the end of the second day, the loneliness outweighs common sense. She chews three leaves and washes them down with water.

Tonight Joel asks about Seattle. The role reversal makes Ellie numb. Once not so long ago, she was the one looking at him, all too certain about the terrible things he had done in her name. She had asked him to tell her the truth about the hospital, whatever it was, without any promises of forgiveness. 

“There’s a group out there. The WLF. Washington Liberation Front. Wolves. That’s what she was part of. It wasn’t the Fireflies. We followed Tommy, and Jesse followed us,” Ellie says.

And if that didn’t just sum up Jackson. Growing up in the Boston QZ, life had been strict law and order. Maybe people hadn’t liked it -- what was there to like about low rations and dangers lurking behind every boarded up building? -- but the rules had been absolute. As a little kid, she’d had no idea about the smugglers, the quiet rebellions and illegal trading, and she had even less idea of the chaos that reigned outside of the sturdy chain link barriers and military patrols.

Jackson had felt like the kind of place she would have dreamed of if she had known how. The kids were just kids, the food was plentiful and shared with everyone, and people picked one another every day. In some way, it started with Tommy and Maria, their warm strength, but it flowed down until even Ellie had found family in it. 

“What happened?” Joel asks.

“Had to fight our way through them.” She swallows the words she doesn’t want to say, but he cuts her no slack.

“Why?”

She asked herself that same question in the theatre. In Nora’s face afterward, she had seen shades of the adult Riley never got to be, ghosts of an old friend who would not recognize her Ellie now. In a pregnant woman’s limp body, Ellie had seen the last of the lines she would not cross disappear, obliterated in adrenaline. 

Ellie sees them behind her eyelids now, more vivid than usual. They are fueled by the same drug haze that lets her see Joel.

Joel’s face, bloodied, destroyed, flashes to blot out the others and gives her words.

“Because every son of a bitch who was there deserved it.”

That feels good. Feels right. She uses those words like armor, making her to be stronger, faster, more certain. She changes the subject before he can pick it apart and show her just how bare it is.

  
  
  
  


Ellie starts to chew the leaves during the day, and it is the discovery that changes everything. Now Joel is more than just a shadow by a campfire. They are traveling companions once more, and they’re getting closer to Salt Lake City. Ellie sees it looming on the map, watches her Sharpie march closer.

When they pass through old civilization, Joel reminds her to be careful, gives her this stern, irritated look she never appreciated before. A few days ago, she knew he wasn’t real, but now, the lines are so blurred she asks him for a boost now and again. She thinks… well, she thinks maybe he must have helped her because she makes it everywhere she tries to go.

Ellie loses control without seeing it. Perhaps it is easier because she had so little to start with. Driven by a kind of madness, she simply trades one for another.

She starts to lose time. One day she wakes up under a brutal noon sun on broken asphalt. She’s just laying there, mouth dry as cotton balls, head throbbing. 

Another day, she finds a pair of squirrels she doesn’t remember killing hanging from her backpack. She checks and recognizes her own marksmanship. Nagging worries nibble at her the whole time she dresses and dries the kill.

But she doesn’t stop. 

**Author's Note:**

> So I won't call this a fix-it fic because I thought the game was great, but I could not shake this idea.
> 
> See, when the game started with the sequence with Ellie and Dina smoking and then Joel dying, I thought the drug use was foreshadowing that Ellie was going to end up hallucinating Joel. I wasn't expecting them to have made a trailer that straight up LIED about that one line.
> 
> I'm ALWAYS down to talk about video games I love with folks, so comment away!


End file.
